(not my OC nor my OP, just helping spread the message around:-)
Well, global meat consumption per Capita is going down YOY so something is working.
Methane gas is basically our greatest enemy at this point
There’s an interesting graph that someone posted in https://aussie.zone/comment/14827931, but I am no expert so I have no idea personally, just sharing that, which seems to suggest that the highest areas are residential energy and road transportation. Whether that in turn traces to Methane I have no idea:-).
I mean from the cow farts but yeah. If we can do that one at the same time as carbon much better
The nice thing is that if we could work on either, then we could work on both at the same time. Caveat: we cannot work on either, for the most part, bc people are selfish and short-sighted:-(.
the two greatest things you can do for climate change: Live vegan, and not have children.
Actual greatest thing you could do for climate change: destroy the US military industrial complex. Not only is it a massive polluter, it also enables the capitalists to maintain their ability to extract fossil fuels and other resources around the world.
Quit it with the anti-human shit. If we’re not saving the environment for us what’s the point?
i saw a video on youtube, by someone named sabine said everyone gave up on climate action, yea they gave up like years ago, the only miracle was when lockdown happened, and global co2 fell very fast and nature quickly reclaimed certain areas. like they pretended to care, but never did anything to stop it. even in research i heard that you cant frame climate change was leaning towards caused by “people” or your research wont get funded, thats how bad funding grant sis for research for some universities.
sabine also posted absolute horseshit about trans people so I don’t trust anything she says about science anymore
She posted a nuanced video about hormones and surgery on trans-identified minors, that considered both sides of the issue. If you find that “absolute horseshit” then you are not interested in science but in religion.
get out of here. there’s no both sides to the issue and she used faulty evidence to push bullshit that’s been debunked over and over.
I heard she made another dumbass video about autism but couldn’t stomach to go through it.
she’s full of shit.
So religion then
if you don’t understand what words mean, then yeah sure
its to late, its over, to prevent catastrophe.
its not to late to ensure we have a minimal catastrophe instead of a maximal catastrophe.
I think this message has good and bad uses. As a way to stop people from being doomers and not taking any action? Great. But I’ve also seen this kind of argument be used to justify an incrementalist approach to an issue that we absolutely cannot afford to go slow on or half ass. “Something is better than nothing” isn’t good enough. If we take 1 step forward and 2 steps back we’re going to lose. And that’s if the problem was linear. The fact that feedback loops accelerate the problem means we lose more and more ground the longer we wait to rip the bandaid off.
If the best allowable solution is to keep electing liberals who take money from capitalists to promote symbolic progress or “market based solutions” while continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects, then we really are doomed.
True, but also don’t allow perfection to be the enemy of good.
I recall in Star Wars when the Jedi accused the Trade Federation of having invaded Naboo. Did it really? This needs to be verified, doesn’t it? Oh but wait, it’s the word of “Jedi”, right, not just “some guys”? Yeah but can we really play at favoritism? Wait, how is that favoritism when they have an established mandate to help protect the Republic… and on and on.
Ironically, they could have sent an entire fleet, and if it turned out to be a simple misunderstanding, then oops, so well, now we know not to trust even “Jedi” in the future.
People are really bad at measuring the cost of NOT acting. Like yeah, vaccines can cause all kinds of things up to and including death… but then again, so too can a deadly disease?!
Anyway, the job of science is to figure stuff out and communicate what was found - not even - necessarily, at least usually - including translation to the general public, which is more of a reporting task. Politics doesn’t even begin to enter into that. So I think it’s awesome that this science post is pointing out some facts that may be relevant as people discuss the political ramifications and next steps. Ofc communication is a 2-way endeavor and if politicians don’t understand what the scientist is saying, they can ask questions, but so far the OOP scientist here seems to have done her part, and quite well it looks to me (who admittedly knows next to nothing whatsoever about climate science, but at least this seems to have succeeded at the communicate clearly portion:-).
True, but also don’t allow perfection to be the enemy of good.
I think this logic fundamentally misses the point. This isn’t me not starting a project because I don’t think I could do it perfectly so why bother. It’s someone else showing me their outline for the project and telling me that I don’t need to do anything, they’ll get it done on time. Then it doesn’t get done because they never intended to do anything, they just didn’t want anyone else completing anything.
If we were just doing small things because that’s all we could feasibly do for now and we’re working our way up to big things, that’d be fine. It might not be enough, but it’d be what we’re working with. But the small actions being taken by capitalist governments aren’t designed to chip away at the problem slowly. Their purpose is to give the appearance that the current system is capable of solving the problem and someone is working on it, so we don’t need to think about more radical solutions. The goal is to block progress, not merely to work on it in some slow and responsible way. “Look, the government joined a non-binding agreement saying that we’re working on climate change! We should totally keep voting for them because it’s better than nothing!”
It’s even worse than that though. They’re not just doing things for show to dampen political will for greater change. These are the same people that keep giving the military, surveillance, and police state more and more money and power. We are allowing them to build the tools they need to keep us in our place. By continuing along this path we’re making it harder and harder for us to eventually do what needs to be done.
The reality is that we’re not going to be able to save ourselves while capitalists are in charge. Capitalism fundamentally demands endless growth and a concentration of wealth and power. Efforts to curtail that growth will be stopped and the costs of that growth is distributed to those with less power.
As for the science/science communication part of this: I think it should be pretty clear that that isn’t the problem. The science is well known at this point. The problem is that the people who have the power to fix things don’t care and are so invested in the status quo that they’d sooner ratchet up violent repression before they’d actually try to solve the problem.
It’s never too late if you seriously consider all your options Ie:
Full nuclear energy development with SMRs
Fusion reactors research
Full transition to electric/hydrogen vehicles
Economic sanctions to countries with grid power coming from carbon/ non renewable resources above a certain percentage
Full development of lunar/cis lunar infrastructure/space
Large scale deployment of solar mirror arrays designed to reflect incoming sunlight, built using lunar regolith as raw materials source
Blowing an 88 megatons hydrogen bomb under the sea, below 8 to 12 Km under the ocean floor surface to trigger about 30 years of carbon capture in a second
You know, easy stuff
And so on
I’m a pessimist in that even in the best possible situation humans would still find a way to overpopulate the earth until no solution is viable. We are parasites
We are categorically not parasites. We don’t live in/on another organism deriving nutritional value from the bodies as hosts
We and other animals eat plants/plan eaters directly. We are not hosted by plants or plant eaters.
If that were the case, other animals would also be parasites. At most, we are predators
There are many definitions of parasites tho and all hinge on the time the parasite spends in/on the host
O…k…a…y… lemme just get right onto that now… You know what, I think I’ll take a nap, and perhaps get back to it tomorrow? 👨🔬☢️💥
Don’t worry bro we’ve got people working on it as we speak
The US is fucked anyway, but if China and the EU worked together, greatness could be approved on potentially the most important front:
Economic sanctions to countries with grid power coming from carbon/ non renewable resources above a certain percentage
However, the one I’m most curious about is the following:
Blowing an 88 megatons hydrogen bomb under the sea, below 8 to 12 Km under the ocean floor surface to trigger about 30 years of carbon capture in a second
How would this work? I’m really interested in the mechanics of this, not so much the feasibility (which is non-existent anyway)
Oh the biggest bomb one is actually extremely simple
. Create (an) hydrogen) atomic bomb(s) with yield equal to or similar to 88 megatons . Go to seabed , about 12 km down on Ocean floor
. Drill about 8 to 12 km into basalt ( basalt is a mineral that fixes to carbon )
. Detonate bomb
. Watch trillions of basalt mineral get pulverized instantly into the sea
. Allow sea currents to distribute this all over the world
. Watch how oceans start absorbing more CO2
. Watch as global temperatures drop a degree and a half (1.5)
Repeat as needed, remember not to overdo it. Thankfully the ocean is extremely good at absorbing any radiation if any dares to escape
Hmm something tells me this might cause unforeseen consequences for aquatic life… But we won’t know until we try!
Well you wouldn’t explode it just anywhere, there are tons of deserted seabed places about.
The best is that the explosion would be mitigated greatly by the teratons of basalt and water over the explosion
Great but I already do as much as I personally can handle. Would be great if society at large, e.g. laws, regulations, and big corps, could get on the same level.
Me: dusts off hands Installed solar on the roof, bicycling to work, updated the insulation on all my windows, and drastically reduced the amount of plastic in my life.
Tech Company Next Door: CONSUMES 70 MwH OF POWER FOR TWO YEARS STRAIGHT POWERING AN UNOPTIMIZED AI
Me: Begins flipping through a copy of How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Don’t blow up the pipeline, that’ll pollute the environment! Go for the pumping infrastructure, if you can knock out a pump you can decrease or even completely stop the flow of oil.
id guess pumps are more expensive to fix too. but also probably better guarded.
That’s what this post is saying. Do YOUR part. That’s all you can do.
That’s all you can do.
It’s not “all” you can do, though. At what point does “eco-terrorism” turn into “justified self-defense?”
There’s a clear difference between being in big trouble and being completely screwed. If we can avoid the extinction of humanity and go with catastrophic disasters and famine that eradicates vast majority of the population, we should totally do it.
Ideally, we would avoid all that, and go back to the good old days. Every small step towards that goal is worth it, although taking longer steps is highly encouraged.
Above a certain threshold there will be no discernible difference in the outcome to our civilisation.
The planet is fine. The people are fucked. G. Carlin was and is right.
No offense, but this is exactly the kind of active pessimism that this post is trying to combat. The only mindset that creates positive change is active optimism. In other words, hope for better and taking action to try and get there.
Note that this is not to be confused with inactive optimism. “Everything will just work out on its own”. That also doesn’t work.
Active pessimism is the most damaging mindset, though, because it actively drains others of their will to make things better. Feeling hopeless is real and understandable, I’ve been feeling it, too. Spreading it around and shutting down those who are trying to do better isn’t the way to process it, though.
Fucking hope police with their unscientific view that honest assessments and factual information are less important than optimism.
The OP’s tweet is wrong.
This is undeniable.
There are certain limits past which feedback loops kick in and after which our actions won’t matter.
I mean thats not really true even if the most catastrophic of feedback loops was actively happening if we invented something for effective carbon capture and storage or did something more drastic like launch enough nukes to start a nuclear winter we could still do something.
Carbon capture and nuclear winter won’t do a goddamn thing if the clathrate gun goes boom, and it is looking like it has:
And that single release, equivalent to two years of human output, is the tip of the spear.
Hope police want to argue that if we are calm about things and don’t point out the dire situation we’re in, we’ll somehow manage.
It’s the same argument as telling a passenger in a car driving towards a cliff at 50 mph, close enough that seconds matter, to not yell ‘CLIFF! BRAKE!’ Because it would demoralize the driver, and should instead calmly inform the driver that we might have some problems if they don’t stop applying pressure to the gas.
I think you misunstand my point. I’m saying that doing nothing is never the only option. There are a lot of people saying that the world is fucked so we might as well do nothing. my only point is that we should at least try doing something.
It’s more like me saying to the driver you should use the ebrake after it becomes too late to use the normal breaks and other people saying that since the normal breaks won’t work we might as well do nothing and accept flying off the cliff full force.
Except that this is the argument that hope police give to people screaming to pull the brake. Not just to people black pilled.
A bit sad how pessimistic everyone is. Renewables are currently becoming the most economic way to produce electricity and even states that do not care about the environment are investing in it. EVs are making progress as well. And while it is true that a lot of damage has already been done and we will face the consequences, I also feel that decarbonization is inevitable even from a economic perspective at this point. The speed at which this happens is variable though and determines how many people will die, this is why it is important to not be pessimistic and hopeless but to try steering things in the right direction.
Personally, the “renewable” energies aren’t making me hopeful. Because they are absolutly not renewable, they can’t be build without pollution because of the materials you need. And even so, climate change is not even the worst of our existential threats, there are many more, but strangely, people are only talking about climate.
Mind elaborating on the other threats?
Soil depletion, (micro)plastics in the water, biodiversity collapse, political instability, economical crisis, nuclear menace that is not a thing of the past anymore, sanitary crisis that will likely be worse than COVID, to name a few.
Soil depletion is solved by climate change by freeing up frozen arable land of countries that are basically under a blanket of ice for the whole year
A bit sad how pessimistic everyone is.
Americans are pessimistic because we don’t have a functional democracy and our fascist oligarchs are too stupid to use their resources to fight climate change… And the rest of the world is pessimistic because the world’s most powerful economy and military has fallen to fascist oligarchy.
Nothing will change until we abolish the billionaires and replace our two party system with a modern multiparty parliamentary system with proportional representation
USAmericans have a religious attachment to fossil fuels that I can’t understand. “Drill baby drill” isn’t even economically viable and yet has become a call to prayer for many US politicians.
It’s rich people who want to keep being rich without risking going into a different thing.
Please stop attributing it to everyone, it’s really annoying
Who is voting for them and why do they win elections if there isn’t a substantial of people who support the idea? “Drill baby drill” isn’t a secret, it is what Republicans have been running on for over a decade.
Just slightly more people (who bother to vote) than who don’t. Doesn’t make it 100%, it’s not rocket science.
